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"The urge to save humanity is almost alwaysa false front for the urge to rule" - H.L.Mencken

Not to belabour the point, you understand, but ….

Reported from America that a North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to Global Warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. Ironic or what?

The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment. They said it was "quite a bit colder" than they had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times.

A spokesman said "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with Global Warming, but one of the things we see with Global Warming is unpredictability."

Yeah, right.

According to the official United States Climate Summary, the average temperature in the US in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was 1.8 degrees F. cooler than the 20th Century average and the 34th coolest February in 113 years.

Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball, who has been questioning man-made Global Warming for 30 years, has received five death threats by email. Resentment toward Ball escalated when his Canada Free Press (CFP) February 5th column, "Global Warming: The Cold Hard Facts?" was posted by the Drudge Report.

"We're worried about him," Ball's wife said.

Her husband continues with his speaking engagements. "Man-made Global Warming crusaders don't tolerate dissent. There's billions of dollars at stake," says Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. While the proponents of man-made global warming have made it the new religion, Ball and some of his colleagues remember when global cooling was all the rage.

His prediction that the United Nations authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be soon making wildly alarmist statements came true recently when some scientists on the panel claimed that within just a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people will die for lack of water.

"Things are happening and happening faster than we expected," said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report. And Terry Root of Stanford University said: "We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction of species." Meanwhile, other scientists have resorted to threats of legal action to avoid being associated with a report they do not support.

Tim Ball is unrepentant, however. "Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist," he writes. "And I am not the only one trying to make people open their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was one of the first Canadian PhDs in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition."

"Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science," he goes on. "Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened. I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us "deniers", with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has really got nasty and personal."

Ball and colleagues appeared in "The Great Global Warming Swindle", the Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists claimed the theory of man-made Global Warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored. Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also appeared on the documentary recently claimed "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

Dr. Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do," while Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."

Yet another well-known scientist has spoken out about the false claims that man-made CO2 is responsible for climate change.

Research by a German professor, Ernst-Georg Beck, shows that the IPCC construed and concocted the pre-1957 CO2 record from measurements on recently drilled ice cores, ignoring more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods from 1857 to 1957.

The IPCC's hoked-up record attempts to prove that CO2 concentrations have been steadily increasing with the progress of human industrial civilization. Beck's work confirms a wealth of previous investigations which demonstrate that the IPCC cherry-picked its data in an attempt to prove that we must stop industrial development and return to the horse-and-buggy age, or face oppressive heat and melting of the polar ice caps. It shows that the Kyoto Treaty on reduction of greenhouse gases was based on a scientific fraud which violates the laws of the universe, denying the well-established determination of climate by cyclical variations in the Earth-Sun orbital relationship and in the Sun's heat output.

In a thorough review of 175 scientific papers, Professor Beck found that the founders of modern greenhouse theory, Guy Stewart Callendar and Charles David Keeling (a special idol of Al Gore's), had completely ignored careful and systematic measurements by some of the most famous names of physical chemistry, among them several Nobel prize winners. Measurements by these chemists showed that today's atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 380 parts per million (ppm) have been exceeded in the past, including a period from 1936 to 1944, when the CO2 levels varied from 393.0 to 454.7 ppm.

There were also measurements, accurate to within 3%, of 375.00 ppm in 1885 (Hempel in Dresden), 390.0 in 1866 (Gorup, Erlangen), and 416.0 in 1857 and 1858 (von Gilm, Innsbruck). Ironically, although the 1940s increase correlated with a period of average atmospheric warming, Beck and others have shown that the warming preceded the increase in CO2 concentrations.

By contrast, the measurements hoked up from ice cores show a rather steady increase in CO2 levels, conveniently corresponding to the preconceived idea that increasing industrial activity has produced a steady CO2 increase. As Beck's collaborator, Dr. Zbigniew Jaworoswki, former senior advisor to the Polish radiation monitoring service and a veteran mountaineer who has excavated ice from 17 glaciers on six continents, has shown, the gaseous inclusions in ice cores have no validity as historical proxies for atmospheric concentrations. The continual freezing, refreezing, and pressurization of ice columns drastically alters the original atmospheric concentrations of the gas bubbles.

According to the greenhouse warming theory, the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration caused by human activity, such as burning of fossil fuels, acts like the glass in a greenhouse to prevent the re-radiation of solar heat from near the Earth's surface. Although such an effect exists, carbon dioxide is low on the list of greenhouse gases, accounting for at most 2 or 3 percent of the greenhouse effect. By far the most important greenhouse gas is water vapour. However, water in the form of clouds can reflect back solar radiation, causing temperature reduction. Indeed there are so many interrelated effects that correlating global temperature to CO2 concentration is like attempting to predict the value of a hedge fund by the phases of the Moon.

Polar bears have become the cuddly symbol of the "war" on climate change, but experts in Canada are now asking "if the polar bear is the 650-kilogram canary in the climate change coal mine, why are its numbers increasing?"

The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s. As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400. The Inuit have always insisted the bears' demise was greatly exaggerated by scientists doing projections based on fly-over counts, but their input was usually dismissed as the ramblings of self-interested hunters. As Nunavut government biologist Mitch Taylor observed in a front-page story in the Nunatsiaq News last month, "the Inuit were right. There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears."

Their widely portrayed lurch toward extinction on a steadily melting ice cap is not supported by bear counts in other Arctic regions either. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is collecting feedback on whether to declare the polar bear "threatened" under its Endangered Species Act, joining the likes of the rare red-cockaded woodpecker, the lesser prairie chicken and the Sonoran pronghorn, which are afforded official protection and species recovery management. The service held its first public hearing on the polar bear project last night in Washington D.C.

But background papers for the debate hardly justify a rush to protect the bear from extinction if its icy habitat fades to green. The service identifies six Arctic regions where data are insufficient to make a call on the population, including the aforementioned Baffin shores area. Another six areas are listed as having stable counts, three experienced reduced numbers and two have seen their bears increase. Inuit also argue the bear population is on the rise along western Hudson Bay, in sharp contrast to the Canadian Wildlife Service, which projects a 22% decline in bear numbers.

That's hardly overwhelming proof of a species in peril in Canada, which claims roughly two thirds of the world's polar bear population. Yet Canada has become home to the official poster-species for "extinction by climate change". Everywhere you look, the doomed polar bear's story is illustrated with the classic photo of a mother and cub teetering on an fragile-looking ice floe, the ice full of holes and seemingly about to disappear into the sea. "The drama is clear. This is truly the tip of an iceberg, the bears are desperately stranded as the water swells around them," according to a recent article in The Observer magazine carrying the photo.

The photo has been vilified on the Internet as a fake. Even if it's the real thing, the photographer was clearly standing on something solid not far from his forlorn looking subjects. For a species that can swim dozens of kilometres to find a decent seal dinner, a few hundred metres to shore is a leisurely doggie paddle to safety. So much for the optic of a doomed global warming victim on ice.

In London environmental expert Philip Stott, Professor of Biogeography at the University of London, explains why he believes global warming is just another political bandwagon.

"Every ambitious politician pays lip service to the daft idea that we can control climate, using "global warming" for their own political ends, from forcing you to wear hemp underpants to establishing a new generation of nuclear reactors. But look beyond the rising rhetoric ... what climate are these politicians hoping to produce? The biting cold of 1947, when the sea froze over?

They have abandoned reason. More worryingly, elitist green agendas, like carbon taxes and road pricing, have terrible repercussions for the poor.

Climate is chaos. It is the most complex system, driven by volcanoes, the oceans, clouds, a wobbly Earth, a pulsing sun, and cosmic rays from exploding stars. Dealing with one factor at the margins - human emissions of carbon dioxide - is utterly pointless. Climate is change. It has flipped between hot and cold, dry and wet for 4.5 billion years.

Unfortunately, our politicians have forgotten that a mammoth Ice Age ended only 12,000 years ago, that Medieval England was a balmy vineyard, that the Little Ice Age blasted Europe from the 14th Century onwards, producing the violent winds that sank the Spanish Armada."

Also in London, Telegraph journalist Janet Daley writes about the Channel 4 film "The Great Global Warming Swindle".

"Some of the dissident voices on climate change were rounded up for last week's polemical Channel 4 documentary. Whether or not you were persuaded by their articulate doubts, you could not help being struck by the McCarthyite persecution (up to and including death threats) which their non-conformist opinions had attracted.

Scientists with impeccable credentials, emeritus professors and acknowledged experts in the field being hounded and professionally discredited for their reservations about an established orthodoxy: not a pretty sight.

Hundreds of years after Galileo, we are apparently still prepared to suppress inconvenient intellectual opposition once political interests have become entrenched. Among those who attempted to prevent the film being shown at all was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Chris Huhne, who, without having seen the programme, wrote to Channel 4 executives advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast it.

One respect in which the green lobby is significantly unlike the Trotskyist movement of my youth is that it seems not to give a stuff about the poor. Green taxes are regressive: they hit the lower paid much harder than the affluent, who can simply absorb the extra costs and carry on living and flying as they always have.

Mr Cameron and Mr Brown both profess themselves committed to the needs of families. Who would be hit harder by increases in the cost of home heating fuel and the use of water meters: young parents who bath their children every night and use their washing machine every day, or rich singles who eat out every night and take their laundry to the dry cleaners? And, of course, the same logic applies to big business - which can easily absorb the added cost of green regulations - as opposed to small businesses, which cannot. Big corporations and retailing chains win all round: they can get political credit for going green while happily watching their small competitors driven out of business by the price of meeting environmental rules.

There is big money to be made now out of climate change, and not just by huge supermarket chains and manufacturers cashing in on the government grants and the contracting market which will be produced by eliminating smaller suppliers.

Clever entrepreneurs have seen an opening: "carbon offsetting" is a completely unregulated growth industry that offers to take your money in return for cancelling out your contribution to global warming, by all sorts of dubious means such as planting forests, which may or may not survive. Rather like the medieval papacy selling indulgences, the offset people give absolution to the better-off in return for cash.

But the lower-paid in Europe will be less hard hit in the green scenario than the wretchedly poor of the developing world. One of the disturbing points in the Durkin documentary was that some of the most desperately backward areas of sub-Saharan Africa are being told that they must not exploit their oil reserves to create electricity because more use of fossil fuel would damage the planet. Without using oil to electrify the countryside, these African nations will be effectively prevented from bringing the benefits of modern life - safe water supplies, irrigation and lighting - to the mass of their peoples within a generation. Well, the green apologists say, even if our computer models are flawed, and our extrapolations prove unsound, isn't it better to "clean up the planet" anyway? Why not take the steps to reduce carbon emissions and pay the hard price just in case it is all true?

I don't know about you, but before I can feel comfortable asking people in emerging economies such as India to forgo the benefits of economic growth and mass prosperity, before I can sentence some of the poorest people in the world to living indefinitely without modern technology, before I am even prepared to ask the lower-paid of this country to give up the improvements in their quality of life to which they have only just become accustomed - I want to hear any and every argument that is to be had about this theory.

And to the comrades in the green movement, I would say this: before you slam the lid on debate, and put your invasive restrictions into place to deny people freedoms and comforts that have transformed their condition, you had better be damned sure that you are right."

And in sunny Hertfordshire that stalwart bastion of common sense, author Frederick Forysth who is old enough, famous enough and rich enough not to care what anyone says, claims we are becoming hysterical about climate change.

Mr Forsyth, who lives on a farm near Hertingfordbury, found himself in a minority as he spoke on BBC1's Question Time recently. David Millipede, the Environment Secretary, told the programme "just last Friday, we had 2,500 scientists from around the world saying this is much more urgent that politicians have recognised" (he carefully ignored all those scientists who didn't actually contribute but had their names put on the list anyway, and those who resorted to threats of legal action to get their names removed).

But Mr Forsyth, the author of best-selling novels like The Odessa File and The Fourth Protocol, countered "I'm very sceptical about some of the excesses that I regard the Milibands of this world are leading towards. When you think about it, it's all been incredibly rapid - a year, a year and a half. And it's not a concern: it's an obsession. It's something very close to hysteria. There are a lot of questions about the whole business of climatology that I cannot secure answers to."

"Why, for example, could the Romans in 200AD grow grapes on Hadrian's Wall? Is it true that the climate of the planet changes roughly every 500 years, warming and cooling, warming and cooling? If it is true, what percentage is down to man and what percentage is down to nature?"

Meanwhile in Seattle there's been a right old ding-dong about one set of Global warming figures.

The snowpack in the Cascades, it was said, shrank by 50% in the last half-century. It's been presented as glaring evidence of the cost exacted by Global Warming - the drying up of a vital water source. That statistic has been repeated in a government report, on environmental-advocacy websites and in media coverage. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently mentioned it in a guest column in The Seattle Times.

Problem is, the number is dead wrong.

The debunking of this statistic, and the question of just how much the state's snowpack shrank, has stirred up a heated debate among the region's climate scientists. Recently it escalated further when University of Washington researcher and State Climatologist Philip Mote stripped a colleague of his title as associate state climatologist, triggering concerns that scientific dissent is being quashed.

Philip Mote says that 50% decrease since 1950 should actually be 35%. Professor Dennis Hartmann, chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department, after a meeting with the different sides and consultations with other scientists said it was 30% since 1945.

Mote, upset that Albright was broadly distributing e-mails about the issue, last week told Albright that he would have to let Mote preview any e-mails before sending them out, if he was tying his work to the state climatologist's office. When Albright refused Mote's ultimatum, Mote barred him from associating himself with the state climatologist's office.

"I'm not trying to squelch debate by any means," Mote said.

But Mass said Albright was doing nothing wrong - simply airing his analysis and seeking feedback as he researched further. "In all my years of doing science, I've never seen this sort of gag-order approach to doing science," he said.

And so on and so on, and frankly who gives a toss about a silly squabble between some minor scientists in a backwater of America? Not the GOS, for one. But it does go to show, doesn't it, how fragile the evidence can be on which the whole Global Warming movement is founded?

Not that it'll stop the bastards.

And the last word - for now - goes to the Reverend Dan Marler, writing in the Southtown News. Never let it be said that The GOS spares any effort to bring you the facts - or, since the man is a vicar, the prejudices.

"Now that Al Gore has his Oscar, the truth of catastrophic manmade global warming surely has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, right? Sure, just ask noted climatologist Leonardo DiCaprio.

"I have to admit, I find myself resisting much of the message of the global warming activists because the global warming crowd exhibits a political agenda and a sort of radical fanaticism that is troubling. Even to a simple layman like myself, they appear to ignore and misrepresent any evidence that may call into question the conclusions of the global warming orthodoxy.

"In fact, without a lot of study or research, I have found examples of data being covered up. For instance, in a non-fiction appendix to his novel "State of Fear," Michael Crichton reveals that after the hardcover publication of the book, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies actually changed its website to withhold data that created some doubt regarding global warming. Crichton writes, "GISS changed its website to show less data. The station data no longer goes back before 1880 and thus heightens the appearance of a steady rise in temperature."

"If the scientific conclusions of the global warming activists are true, then data should not have to be covered up or hidden. There should be no need to hide any facts."

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